Unliterary, Unpolished, Unromantic
Charles Nicholl: ‘The Merchant of Prato’, 8 February 2018
The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City
by Iris Origo.
Penguin, 400 pp., £10.99, May 2017,978 0 241 29392 8 Show More
by Iris Origo.
Penguin, 400 pp., £10.99, May 2017,
“... at great personal risk. To some she seemed aloof: she had a ‘built-in distance’. Susanna Johnston, who worked for Iris’s widowed stepfather, Percy Lubbock – Lady Sybil’s third husband – in the late 1950s, recalls her visits: ‘she was a formidable creature with a gigantic brain and expensive clothes … She treated us graciously, as she ... ”